A Milwaukee Bucks blog hoping for the best

Pythagoras Loves Basketball – Nov. 12

We’re more than 10 percent done with the NBA season already, which is a sad thought. But fear not, for I bring good tidings of estimated winning percentages, courtesy of our good friend Pythagoras (and also Bill James, Dean Oliver, and John Hollinger)! As you can see below, before last Tuesday’s game against the Knicks, Milwaukee had an estimated winning percentage under 0.40. Just three days later, Milwaukee is expected to win almost 50 games! How quickly things can change when the ball starts finding the bottom of the net. This number will continue to change significantly for a while before starting to stabilize around mid-season.

The “True Winning Percentage” currently lags behind the expected percentage simply it is calculated from a smaller sample of games. Still, for now it’s interesting to see how winning games and point differential affect a team’s projected record. For those of you who are curious, I’m using an exponent of 14 in the Pythagorean expectation calculation. John Hollinger typically uses 16.5, but Dean Oliver explains in his book Basketball on Paper how 14 works well for slower-paced NBA teams. Frankly, you can’t spell slower-paced without Milwaukee.